Karl Prusik

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Karl Prusik (born May 19, 1896 in Vienna , † May 8, 1961 in Perchtoldsdorf near Vienna) was an Austrian mountaineer and music teacher . From 1939 to 1941 and 1951 to 1953 he was President of the Austrian Alpine Club (ÖAK), and is best known as the inventor of the Prusik knot named after him . After the First World War , Prusik studied musicology , received his doctorate in 1923 on the compositions of the lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss and became a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory .

Worldview

As a climbing instructor, Karl Prusik has been one of the Alpine pedagogues of a social Darwinism who went in search of a new racial or religious truth since the 1920s . He represented the social Darwinist legitimacy of a combat alpinism that was supposed to produce a new person, the mountaineer as the latest thought of the world spirit . He referred to a Germanism that defeated the Romans and to the inheritance of racial racial characteristics . In the reality of the first post-war period, he saw only the decadence of the effeminate city life. Prusik was a lieutenant in the mountain war 1915-1918 and saw in the virtues of alpinism a recovery for the next war preparation. He thus prepared the ground for militarism for a ethnic-Alpine youth elite in Vienna. His field of activity was the young team of the Academic Section Vienna of the DuOeAV , founded in 1920 with open revanchism , whose trainer he became in 1921. The question of whether he can be said to have anti-Semitic tendencies is answered differently in the literature. The historian Rainer Amstädter claims such in connection with the sexual abstinence propagated by Prusik for “German” mountaineers. Nicholas Mailänder, on the other hand, writes in his work Imzeichen des Edelweiss that Prusik supported those ostracized by the Alpine Club by publishing articles in the newsletter of the Alpine Club Donauland .

Second World War

Prusik was one of the willing supporters of the National Socialist Alpine Club elite, led by Arthur Seyß-Inquart , and carried out climbing courses for instructors until 1940. In 1941, at the age of 45, he was called up as a lieutenant for the German armed forces. In 1942 he was promoted to Hauptsturmführer of the Waffen-SS and received the War Merit Cross, Second Class, which is awarded for operations behind the front. In 1947 Karl Prusik returned from captivity and again became the first Vice President of the OeAK.

Alpinistic achievements

Prusik knot

Prusik is considered to be the first ascent of over 70 new climbs and routes . Among other things, he was the first to climb the northwest face of the Planspitze, to climb the southwest edge of the Kleiner Bischofsmütze in the Gosaukamm with Roland Hamperl, and he was also the first to climb the spiral path (V) on the Kleiner Zinne and the northeast edge of the Kleiner Buchein . He achieved particular fame through the Prusik knot named after him , which he described for the first time in the Austrian Alpenzeitung in 1931 and which is still considered to be the most famous clamping knot worldwide . In 1932 he coined the German term Torlauf for slalom races in skiing. The 2,438  m high Prusik Peak in Washington was named after Karl Prusik by its first climbers in 1948.

Publications by Karl Prusik

  • The guitarist Jakob Ortner as a teacher and a person . News from the Association of Guitarists, Vienna 1984 (posthumously).
  • The mountaineer Archduke Johann . Association of Austrian Alpine Clubs, Vienna 1959.
  • A Viennese climbing instructor . Artaria, Vienna 1929.
  • Gymnastics for mountaineers . Bergverlag Rother , Munich undated (around 1925).

literature

Web links

Commons : Karl Prusik  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Prusiks dissertation
  2. ↑ German Biographical Encyclopedia, Munich 2007, p. 98
  3. ↑ Karl Prusik: Der Ostpfeiler der Kleiner Zinne , in: Der Bergsteiger 40 , 1925, p. 255
  4. ↑ 50 years of the ASW , Festschrift, Vienna 1938, p. 26
  5. ↑ Rainer Amstädter: Mountaineering - Culture, Organization, Politics , WUV University Verlag Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-85114-273-X , p 429
  6. ↑ Nicholas Mailänder: In the sign of the Edelweiss - the history of Munich as a mountaineering city , AS-Verlag, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-90911-128-9 , p. 163
  7. ^ K. Prusik: Very respectable assembly! , Österreichische Alpen-Zeitung, No. 1220, 1941, p. 35 ff.
  8. ^ SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg, Germany: Contemporary History: Unheard of Deeds - DER SPIEGEL 52/1996. Retrieved August 29, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Rainer Amstädter: Mountaineering - Culture, Organization, Politics . Ed .: WUV-Universitätsverlag. Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-85114-273-X , p. 672 .
  10. ^ ÖAZ 1943
  11. ↑ Österreichische Alpenzeitung, magazine of the Austrian Alpine Club 44th year, Vienna 1922
  12. ↑ German Biographical Encyclopedia, Munich 2007, p. 99
  13. ↑ http://www.bergundstieg.at/file.php/archiv/2005/3/56-60%20(der%20fb-klemmknoten).pdf
  14. ↑ http://members.aon.at/zdarsky-ski-museum/03_zdarsky/03_torlauf/torlauf.htm
  15. ↑ http://www.peakware.com/peaks.html?pk=3056
personal data
SURNAME Prusik, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION President of the Austrian Alpine Club
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1961
Place of death Perchtoldsdorf